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The Labour Church Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

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The conference held at Bradford in 1893 to form an Independent Labour Party was accompanied by a Labour Church service which some 5,000 people attended. It was organised by John Trevor, who in 1891 had left his Unitarian pulpit in Manchester and founded the first Labour Church. “God in the Labour Movement”, he explained “– working through it, as once he worked through Christianity, for the further salvation of the world – that was the simple conception that I had been seeking, and which at last came to me…” The fullest account of this movement created by Trevor has been given in H. M. Pelling's The Origins of the Labour Party, where it is sensibly cited as a stage in the “transfer of social energy from religion to politics.” The purpose of the present article is to dissent from certain judgments made by Mr. Pelling and to suggest, in some particulars, a different interpretation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1958

References

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page 449 note 2 In Labour Church publications there are references to some 50 churches in England (slightly more than half of them in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire), 1 in Wales and 4 in Scotland. At least 37 of the churches were established by 1896, and in no subsequent year do more than 2 appear to have been formed. In 1898 The Labour Prophet (monthly) had to be abandoned for lack of support, and was replaced by a smaller quarterly, The Labour Church Record, which in turn disappeared in 1902, after the secretary of a Labour Church had written in one of the last issues (April 1901, 4): “I find Labour Churches generally weak, unbusiness-like, and quarrelsome”.

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page 450 note 3 A Labour Church Hymn Book was printed in 1892 and another in 1906. The Birmingham Labour Church printed its own in 1894, and a number of Churches printed sheets of hymns from time to time.

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page 453 note 1 Ibid., Sep. 1894,128.

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page 453 note 3 Ibid., June 1896, 90.

page 453 note 4 Ibid., March 1898,162.

page 453 note 5 Ibid., Aug. 1893, 74.

page 454 note 1 Ibid, Dec. 1894,171.

page 454 note 2 Hobson, , op. cit., 40–1. Hobson does not say what they quarrelled about, but this is plain from reports of meetings.Google Scholar

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page 454 note 5 Ibid., May 1892, 40; Dec. 1894,165.

page 454 note 6 Cinderella Clubs were invented by Blatchford when he was on the Sunday Chronicle in 1889. (L. Thompson, Portrait of an Englishman: Robert Blatchford [1951], 62). They were taken up in several Labour Churches, and The Labour Prophet began in May 1893 to include a Cinderella Supplement for children.

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page 454 note 9 Ibid., March–April 1894,41.

page 454 note 10 Ibid., Oct. 1893,100.

page 455 note 1 Birmingham Labour Church, minutes of executive committee meeting, 21 08 1896.Google Scholar

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page 456 note 5 Letter from the committee of the Labour Church Union to members of Labour Churches, 1895, stuck into the minutes of the Birmingham Labour Church.

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page 457 note 2 Ibid., March 1896, 46.

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page 458 note 5 Ibid., July 1896, 119. There were also a number of “Socialist Sunday Schools” run on similar lines, but apparently in association with I.L.P. branches rather than Labour Churches.

page 458 note 6 Ibid., July 1898, 197.

page 458 note 7 Ibid., May 1894, 56.

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page 459 note 5 Birmingham Labour Church, annual report of executive committee, 1909.